Grandparent Quotes - Page 17

• My grandparents invented joylessness. They were not fun. I've already had more fun with my grandchildren than my grandparents ever had with me.

  Billy Crystal

  Fun, Grandchildren, My Grandchildren

  "Billy Crystal: My family values". Interview with Elaine Lipworth, www.theguardian.com. May 24, 2013.

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• Human beings look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then we are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well, and when they were part of his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing--rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mother, Father, Past

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• I hated that the soldier doll had my name. I mean, please. I didn't play with him much. He was another Christmas present from my clueless grandparents. One time when they were visiting, my grandpa asked me if G.I. Joe had been in any wars lately. I said, "No, but he and Ken got married last week." Every Christmas since then, my grandparents have sent me a check.

  James Howe

  War, Clueless, Mean

  James Howe (2005). “Totally Joe”, p.100, Simon and Schuster

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• A grandparent will accept your calls from anywhere, collect.

  Erma Bombeck

  Age, Aging, Accepting

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• If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.

  Richard Dawkins

  Atheist, Believe, Moving

  "Viruses of the Mind". Book by Richard Dawkins, 1993.

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• Are we not like two volumes of one book?

  Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

  Best Friend, Friendship, Relationship

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• Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Sweet, Time, Grandma

  "China: Past and Present". Book by Pearl S. Buck, 1972.

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• In every state of the Union, Fundamentalists still fight to ban all the science they dislike and prosecute all who teach it. To them, 'traditional family values' denotes their right to keep their children as ignorant as their grandparents (and to hate the same folks grand-dad hated.)

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Children, Dad, Hate

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• [After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents'' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mother, Children, Home

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• The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it. Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn't owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed her a break. She had a strong sense that a better, more exciting, more rewarding life than that which had been the lot of her parents and grandparents was hers by right. In this she was guilty of nothing more serious than the arrogance of youth, from which every generation suffers and by which it distinguishes itself from the preceding one.

  James Robertson

  Mother, Strong, Arrogance Of Youth

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• If we're to be judged by our parents and grandparents, then we all may as well impale ourselves upon jagged bits of rock.

  Kristin Cashore

  Rocks, May, Wells

  Kristin Cashore (2009). “Fire”, p.248, Penguin

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• Randy [Rhoads] was laid to rest at a place called Mountain View Cemetery, where his grandparents were buried. I made a vow there and then to honour his death every year by sending flowers. Unlike most of my vows, I kept it. But I’ve never been back to his graveside. I’d like to go there again one day, before I finally join him on the other side.

  Ozzy Osbourne

  Flower, Views, Years

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• How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.

  Studs Terkel

  Work, Fighting, Eight

  Studs Terkel, Sydney Lewis (2010). “Touch and Go: A Memoir (Large Print 16pt)”, p.92, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• If, for example, I saw my grandparents or my daughter for an instant, would I recognize them? Probably not, because in looking so hard for a way to keep them alive, remembering them in the most minimal details, I have been changing them, adorning them with qualities they may not have had. I have given them a destiny much more complex than the ones they lived.

  Isabel Allende

  Daughter, Destiny, Quality

  Isabel Allende (2003). “My invented country: a memoir”, HarperPerennial

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• I am a nice young girl here to pick up your granddaughter for the weekend... We're going to a Bible retreat to scare the devil out of her. - Bones to Cat's grandparents

  Jeaniene Frost

  Girl, Nice, Cat

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• The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Missing, Sound, Television

  Jeffrey Eugenides (2003). “Middlesex”, p.223, A&C Black

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• My grandparents got married at a very young age, and a lot of what I think about marriage is based on their relationship.

  Kyle Chandler

  Thinking, Age, Married

  "Man of the House: Kyle Chandler". Interview with Kate Coyne, www.goodhousekeeping.com. January 25, 2008.

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• to know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother, but must be a grandmother.

  Elizabeth Goudge

  Mother, Perfect, May

  Elizabeth Goudge (1948). “Pilgrim's Inn”

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• it seems to me that grandmothers have a very special place in the affections of young children. Not obliged, as parents are, to provide food, shelter, protection, advice and discipline, day in and day out, they can afford to be much more easy-going. The unexpected present, the extra outing, the little treat of a favourite meal prepared especially to delight the child and, above all, the time to listen to youthful outpourings, all make a grandmother a loved ally. It is hardly surprising that the bond between grandmother and grandchild is often stronger than that between parent and child.

  Miss Read

  Children, Grandmother, Discipline

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• The joke used to be that in every Indian home, there is the mother, father, children, grandparents, and the anthropologist.

  Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

  Mother, Children, Father

  Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (2012). “From the River's Edge”, p.16, Living Justice Press

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• Even as a child I was fascinated by death, not in a spiritual sense, but in an aesthetic one. A hamster or guinea pig would pass away, and, after burying the body, I'd dig it back up: over and over, until all that remained was a shoddy pelt. It earned me a certain reputation, especially when I moved on to other people's pets. "Igor," they called me. "Wicked, spooky." But I think my interest was actually fairly common, at least among adolescent boys. At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project.

  David Sedaris

  Spiritual, Children, Thinking

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• As my name might suggest, I'm Jewish. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews who came to Australia in the late 1920s, and had they not, we wouldn't be talking now.

  Elliot Perlman

  Talking, Names, Australia

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• No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Return, Privilege, Share

  john kenneth galbraith (1971). “the new industrial state”

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• My grandparents all came from Lithuania to South Africa. My first novel, Middlepost, is a fictional account of that journey.

  Antony Sher

  Lithuania, South, South Africa

  "Antony Sher: 'Painting and writing stop me going crazy'". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. January 14, 2012.

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• There are many people who could claim and learn from their Indian ancestry, but because of the fear their parents and grandparents knew, because of past and present prejudice against Indian people, that part of their heritage is clouded or denied.

  Joseph Bruchac

  Past, People, Prejudice

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